Two brothers from the Emilia region decide to set up their own business and to create the first automatic ice cream machine. This is how Carpigiani was born, a company that today has a turnover of 165 million euros, sells everywhere and has come to produce the millionth machine for making ice cream. «Being Italian, we have the passion for healthy food in our genes, as well as the attention to preparing it and a technology that is a combination of craftsmanship and industry. From abroad we have inherited the focus on scalable business models». Giampaolo Colletti interviews Federico Tassi, CEO of Carpigiani Group for FARE INSIEME.
di Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Photocredit: Giacomo Maestri e Francesca Aufiero
This is a story of brotherhood and therefore of love. But it is also a story that comes from a brilliant intuition that becomes a business. Because believing in dreams and making them happen for real can make a difference, not only for oneself but also for the people, the community and for the whole world. This is the story of Carpigiani, an Italian jewel specialised in the production of ice cream machines that still today controls a third of the global market share. There are the machines for the production of “Italian artisan gelato” and those for the production of soft serve and ice-cream. We are based in Anzola dell’Emilia, a town of less than thirteen thousand souls in the metropolitan area of Bologna. But to understand this story that has climbed markets around the world we need to take a step back and go back to that time in between the First and Second World Wars. A time that was uncertain, suspended and frail. But also a time for experimentation, for those who wanted to try to change things. In those years, the engineer Bruto Carpigiani - now recognised as the father of a generation of technicians and designers engaged in the sector of packaging machinery - decided to roll up his sleeves. Starting from the ice cream maker invented by Otello Cattabriga, Carpigiani decided, during the Thirties, to improve it, to innovate it. He worked on the vertical batch freezer in the cellars of via Valeriani in Bologna and managed to design an automatic machine for the production of ice cream from scratch, so that the only task of the ice cream maker in the end was to extract the ice cream from the machine. The evolution, compared to the Cattabriga ice cream maker, was the hermetic closure of the gear box, which also favoured a more hygienic production of ice cream. Then there was the reciprocating-motion spatula, which was replaced with a rotary helical spatula. Unfortunately, Bruto Carpigiani was unable to see his work completed because he died prematurely at the age of only 42 years old, shortly before the publication of the patent. But the year following his death in 1945, his brother Poerio took over and set up the Carpigiani company. Everything started with 50,000 Italian lire of share capital and a small workshop of only twenty square metres, with twelve employees that lived and worked there day and night. Then the exponential growth arrived and for Carpigiani the world became as small as an orange. With the Sixties there was also technological development in the production of ice cream machinery and machines for soft serve were added.
Emilian roots, global vocation. Carpigiani's is a story of the avant-garde. In the 1960s, the company became a joint-stock company for an ice cream that spoke the languages of the world, which was by no means taken for granted at the time. The headquarters remained in Anzola dell’Emilia, but with an international vocation. Also in the Sixties the company expanded into the American market. The first transalpine branch was opened in Paris in 1961. In 1980 the Tokyo branch was opened: Carpigiani Japan, which is still operational and strategic. Already in the 1950s, Poerio dedicated himself to the foreign markets. The documents are proof of this: a diploma awarded to Carpigiani at the Port au Prince fair in Haiti in 1951 is kept in the headquarters. In 1982 Carpigiani was acquired by the Gruppo Ali, now Ali Group. «Carpigiani was first established in an Italy that was devastated by the war but with a strong desire for redemption. Discretionary and leisure-related consumption also started again. It is in this context that Poerio and Bruto Carpigiani put their previous experience in Bolognese mechanics to good use to automate a process, i.e. the homogenization of ice cream, which was hitherto largely left to the operator's manual skills, and only partially automated in some applications that were already present. In fact, Poerio and Bruto created a machine, then continuously improved, which in itself did not revolutionise a food process, but supported the manual labour and helped export the consumption of Italian ice cream all over the world», says Federico Tassi, CEO of Carpigiani Group, born in Bologna in 1979, and working in Carpigiani since 2005. Today, the turnover is 165 million euros. The company has three factories in Emilia-Romagna, more specifically in Anzola, Castel Maggiore and Forlì. There is also a factory in Spain that manages part of the business related to slush machines and two other factories abroad, in China and in the United States. «Being Italian, we have certainly a passion for healthy food in our genes, as well as the attention to preparing it and a technology that is a well-kept combination of craftsmanship and industry. From abroad we have inherited the focus on creating reproducible and profitable business models», says Tassi. In the mid-90s Carpigiani became McDonald's official supplier for soft & shake machines, breaking the monopoly of a historic American company.
Between past and future. To make ice cream, to do it well and to explain how to do it while aiming for excellence. «We have embarked on an educational path and on one of adaptability towards other local food cultures. Ice cream cannot be the same everywhere, but we have decided to bring an Italian heart even to distant places while respecting the local culture», says Tassi. Thus, in 2003 the Carpigiani Ice Cream Uni (Carpigiani Gelato University) was born. «At the end of the 1990s we decided to turn to the person who physically consumes the ice cream», says Tassi. In Malaysia, in Kuala Lumpur, the 21st campus with professional ice-cream making courses is held. Today the company has reached the record figure of one million machines sold since its inception. Looking to the future and preserving the past: this is how the Carpigiani Ice Cream Museum (Gelato Museo Carpigiani) was born in 2012, a centre of cultural excellence dedicated to understanding and studying the history, culture and technology of ice cream. «The vision for the next decade is to transform Carpigiani from a simple ice cream machine company to a global leader in the ice cream sector of all kinds. A Global Frozen Dessert company whose technology is at the service of every semi-liquid or semi-frozen product, from American ice cream to Brazilian “açaí na tigela” up to Asian sweets», concludes Tassi. To travel the world, starting from ice cream and thinking big.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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